This is a great post and a great demo of recursion capabilities in T-SQL/SPs. My current issue is the duplicate key/ID in the source data. What I am trying to do is get the recursive call to just skip to the next highest ID, but the MERGE OUTPUT apparently does not contain anything at all if an error occurs so I can't get the MAX(ID) from the output. In addition, I would rather not have to keep creating UDDTs and passing TVPs for every MERGE I need to do.

*sigh* It seems like another bright idea that Microsoft didn't implement very well (see postings online about duplicate key handling and other features of other RDBMSes).

I need single row error handling and logging, so I am going back to trusty cursors that loop through the IDs and then do a MERGE on each record processed. FYI, cursors perform great when the cursor declare only processes indexed IDs. Then you do the work retrieving other values inside the cursor loop.